To Boil A Frog
by MiroTheCat
Summary: How did Ilosovic Stayne end up right-hand man to a crazy queen? Well, if you put a frog in a pot of water before turning the heat on, it doesn't fight being boiled alive. One oversized boy is in hotter water at every turn.


In retrospect, he never should have taken that job. It had seemed a good idea at the time, after that accident and running away and all, to accept the offer. He had only been ten, and becoming the king's page would certainly put him far above his classmates who had teased him. It wasn't as if he had anywhere else to go. Ever since he'd eaten that Upelkuchen that was past its expiration date and gotten stuck adult-sized and unable to return to normal size, people had thought he was weird, and his classmates had picked on him. They didn't do it to his face anymore after the third time he beat up a bully, but he heard what they said behind his back. It made sense to run away, pose as an adult, take a job offer that handily came along and would put him far above the bullies. And the king was nice, even if he was a complete pushover and let the queen order him around.

Of course, even though he was technically the _king_'s page, he was actually the _queen_'s lackey and whipping-boy. Always yelling, always making him do things for her so that she wouldn't risk getting her shoes dirty or something else absurd like that. That part of the job he wasn't so crazy about. But it was a job and it paid well and the soldiers could be talked into tutoring him in fencing and wrestling when his services weren't required. He really ought to have quit while he had the chance.

He really didn't even know how he could possibly have stolen those tarts. He had been in the presence of the king and queen the entire time. And then next thing he knew he was in chains in front of the court, on trial for eating the queen's damned tarts. As if he would. She always made them with squimberries, and he was _allergic_ to squimberries. As anyone who had spent any quantity of time around him, including the king, well knew. They didn't have a speck of evidence, either. Invented rhymes, babbling about there being pepper in tarts- which even _he_, a 12-year-old boy, knew that there wasn't- and somehow his inability to swim came into it. Absolutely zero proof, for the obvious reason that he was innocent. That final "witness" of theirs, Alice, did try to talk some sense into them, but there was no arguing with the queen. All that she achieved was confusing things so much that no verdict or sentence was ever decided and he was returned to the dungeons until being retried.

The new trial never happened. The queen was too busy playing croquet and beheading anyone who might have looked at her funny, and her attention span and temper alike grew shorter and shorter. She forgot about the man who was really just an adolescent boy sitting in her dungeons. But he didn't forget about her. He watched her every day as she paraded through the dungeons to sneer at the people slated to die soon. He saw her head growing larger and her emotions losing what little maturity they'd had. He wasn't a stupid boy, he saw the signs, and he guessed that there was something the matter with her head. Sitting in that dank cell day after day for years on end, he had nothing better to do than observe and plot and grow. He hit his growth spurts right on schedule, and already being a normal adult size, he towered over everyone more and more. By the time he celebrated his 18th birthday with a feast of scraps that he had been saving from meals all year, he was almost seven feet tall. He'd spent nearly six years- one third of his life- behind bars, and he was getting the slightest bit desperate.

His escape did not go as planned. When the queen entered the dungeons for her daily prance-through-and-sneer, he was on his knees and being grasped rather more tightly than necessary by a large number of soldiers. Really, they barely needed to hold onto him at all, seeing as he seemed to be missing a large part of his face and had definitely broken his arm getting knocked down while partially tangled up in chains. The loss of blood and the pain and the difficulty of seeing through the blood running down his face would have kept him subdued without much involvement from the soldiers. For the first time since he had first been imprisoned, the queen noticed him.

"Who is this enormous man and what are you doing with him?"

"A prisoner, majesty, Ilosovic Stayne. He was trying to escape and we were stopping him, majesty." Weak and certain that he was about to die, be it by blood loss or execution, he mustered the strength to glare defiantly at her through his long matted hair.

"It took all of you to subdue one man? Pathetic. If this happens again, you'll all lose your heads."

"Yes your majesty."

She sauntered over to him and lifted his chin with her scepter. "I like you, Stayne. You have spunk, and you're large. I like largeness in my court." She turned to the soldiers. "Bring him up to my second-favorite bedroom and bring a doctor. Mustn't let my new favorite bleed to death. Move along now."

Finding himself installed in a bed that was large enough for his considerable height and the softest thing he'd ever felt and being fussed over by the doctor and the maids, he was certain that he'd died and gone to heaven. He was clean and warm and thanks to the potion that he'd been given he didn't even feel his injuries anymore. This couldn't be real.

The next few weeks while he recovered were incredible. The queen herself came to visit, and she brought tailors to make him new clothes that fit him and befitted his new status as her favorite, and hairdressers to cut out all the knots and matted bits and make him look stylish, and when his face had healed enough to remove the bandages, she brought him a heart-shaped patch for his missing eye. Like her or not, he was grateful for the attention and he saw the wisdom in kissing up to her and playing her good little favorite. It was that or death, really, and he was willing to do almost anything at this point just to be alive and free.

The other couriers resented him of course, but he was determined to keep his spot at her right hand. When he was irritated with her, which was often, he reminded himself of her swelling head. Whatever was in there was bound to kill her sometime, and as her right hand man and with the king dead, he was next in line to the throne. With a little patience, he would be the next king and everything would be good.

Once he would have been glad that Alice had returned, but now he wasn't. As grateful as he was that she had saved his life years before, she now threatened his plans for a better life. Which wasn't to say that he wanted to kill her, but he saw no other way to keep up his facade of loyalty. And of course she then managed to screw him over, put Mirana in power, steal the crown that he had been planning on being his eventually, and get him literally chained to that bitch Iracebeth when she wasn't even any use to him anymore. He was resourceful though. There had to be a way to remove that chain, and he was going to find it.

* * *

_Just a quick break from my more current stuff, I thought I'd post the Alice In Wonderland fics that have been sitting around on my harddrive for a couple years._

_Yeah, it's open-ended. I probably won't write more chapters for it though, this stands on its own just fine and I have other projects that I'm feeling more._


End file.
